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Jon Krosnick received a B.A. degree in psychology from Harvard University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in social psychology from the University of Michigan.

Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 2004, Dr. Krosnick was professor of psychology and political science at Ohio State University, where he was a member of the OSU Political Psychology Program and co-directed the OSU Summer Institute in Political Psychology.

He has taught courses on survey methodology around the world at universities, for corporations, and for government agencies, including at IBM, Pfizer, the National Opinion Research Center, Total Research Corporation, the American Society of Trial Consultants, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. General Accounting Office, the Office for National Statistics, London, UK, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Johannesburg. He has provided expert testimony in court and has served as an on-air election-night television commentator.

Dr. Krosnick has served as a consultant to such organizations as Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, the Office of Social Research at CBS, the News Division of ABC, the National Institutes of Health, Home Box Office, NASA, the U.S. Bureau of the Census, and the Urban Institute.

Research Interests:

Author of four books and more than 100 articles and chapters, Dr. Krosnick conducts research in three primary areas: (1) attitude formation, change, and effects, (2) the psychology of political behavior, and (3) the optimal design of questionnaires used for laboratory experiments and surveys, and survey research methodology more generally.

His attitude research has focused primarily on the notion of attitude strength, seeking to differentiate attitudes that are firmly crystallized and powerfully influential of thinking and action from attitudes that are flexible and inconsequential. Many of his studies in this area have focused on the amount of personal importance that an individual chooses to attach to an attitude. Dr. Krosnick’s studies have illuminated the origins of attitude importance (e.g., material self-interest and values) and the cognitive and behavioral consequences of importance in regulating attitude impact and attitude change processes.

Among the topics explored by Dr. Krosnick’s political psychology research are: how policy debates affect voters’ candidate preferences, how the news media shape which national problems citizens think are most important for the nation and shape how citizens evaluate the President’s job performance, how becoming very knowledgeable about and emotionally invested in a government policy issue (such as abortion or gun control) affects people’s political thinking and participation, how people’s political views change as they move through the life-cycle from early adulthood to old age, and how the order of candidates’ names on the ballot affect voting behavior.

His questionnaire design work has illuminated the cognitive and social processes that unfold between researcher and respondent when the latter are asked to answer questions, and his on-going review of 100 years worth of scholarly research on the topic has yielded a set of guidelines for the optimal design of questionnaires to maximize reliability and validity. His recent work in survey methodology has explored the impact of mode of data collection (e.g., face-to-face, telephone, Internet) on response accuracy and the impact of survey response rates on substantive results.

Honors:

Dr. Krosnick's scholarship has been recognized with the AAPOR Award (the lifetime achievement award given by the American Association for Public Opinion Research), the Phillip Brickman Memorial Prize for Research in Social Psychology, the American Association for Public Opinion Research Student Paper Award, Midwest Political Science Association's Pi Sigma Alpha Award, the Erik Erikson Early Career Award for Excellence and Creativity in the Field of Political Psychology from the International Society of Political Psychology, a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the University of Wisconsin's Brittingham Visiting Scholar Position, and the American Political Science Association's Best Paper Award.

Personal Life:

In his spare time, Dr. Krosnick has fun with his wife, Professor Catherine Heaney, and their 23-year-old daughter, Alexandra, who is in a PhD program at Columbia University. He also plays drums with a contemporary jazz group called Charged Particles that has released two CD's internationally and tours across the U.S. and abroad. www.chargedparticles.com.

Media Contact

Media Contacts are available to answer media inquiries about their research or other areas of expertise. If you are a reporter, writer, or producer who wishes to schedule an interview, please use the Contact form to send a request that includes: (1) the interview topic, (2) the media outlet or publication you work for, and (3) the date by which you hope to complete the interview.

Primary Interests:

Applied Social Psychology

Attitudes and Beliefs

Communication, Language

Judgment and Decision Making

Persuasion, Social Influence

Political Psychology

Research Methods, Assessment

Social Cognition

Research Group or Laboratory:

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